Re: Framemaker 6 - to buy or not to buy
Hi fellow techies,====================================================
I am in the process of trying to persuade my manager to purchase Framemaker
6 for use in producing all of our hard copy and PDF documentation. At
present we use Word and as I keep telling him the kit ain't up to it.
However he still remains to be convinced and has thrown the issue of
translations into the Bear Pit. All of our documentation is translated into
French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Kanji with the
possibility of Czech and Polish being added to this list in the future. Do
any of you know of any issues with regards to having Framemaker files
translated into these languages? Is Framemaker as 'multilingual' as Word or
are we going to get caught with our pants down on this? Also the
translators we employ to do the translation make extensive use of Trados
Workbench. By going to Framemaker are we going to have problems here and
will we be still able to use the extensive Translation Memeory we have built
up with the translators?
I look forward to your responses
The TRADOS suite of translation software takes FrameMaker MIF
(Maker Interchange Format) files as input, and produces RTF for
the translators, almost all of whom use Word 2000, which is
Unicode-compliant. The translated RTF output from Word is then
run back through TRADOS to again produce MIF, in which all of the
formatting constructs in the original MIF file are preserved.
No release of FrameMaker, including 6.0, supports Unicode.
This is a severe flaw, particularly in cases where multi-language
translations appear in the same document. Unicode-compliant
fonts are available that can handle up to 40 languages.
Such fonts cannot be used with FrameMaker.
To make matters worse, FrameMaker has about 5 locked code points
in the ANSI character set. Eastern European languages such as
Czech and Polish, as well as other languages such as Cyrillic,
require that these code points be available. And of course, languages
such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai are impossible because they
read right-to-left.
Its very sad. Other than the lack of support for Unicode, the FrameMaker/
TRADOS combination is ideal for translating long, complex documents,
but the lack of Unicode and Eastern European language support are show-stoppers.
I'd recommend that you stick with Word 2000 despite its many flaws,
and the miseries you're going to face if you have long documents
with large numbers of graphics, cross-references, and autonumbered
paragraphs.
====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory -at- primenet -dot- com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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